The Rules of Racialists — Part One
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
On a Wednesday, March 18, 2015 photo, a barista at a Seattle Starbucks store writes on a cup for an iced drink as she wears a “Race Together” sticker. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)
Never should racial relations be better. Intermarriage between various ethnic, religious, and racial groups has become commonplace. Every family that I know can no longer be termed white or Latino or black, despite the efforts of government and academic clerks to insist on such.
Cousins, nephews, grandkids, spouses, and in-laws now all look quite different from each other. Walk downtown Palo Alto, and couples of the same racial appearance are not the norm. The president, the attorney general, the national security advisor, the chief presidential advisor, the director of Homeland Security, the director of NASA, and the former EPA head are black. To watch television commercials is to see all races hawking shared products — quite unlike in the rest of the world, where they would be more likely killing each other.
Yet racial relations have also rarely been worse in the last half-century, illustrating the old sociology adage that the faster things improve and ameliorate, the more they are declared ossified and hopeless.
Perhaps because revolutionaries and the opportunistic fear that with progress for all comes obsolescence for themselves.
We live in such a strange world. Our government compiles exhaustive statistics on race and crime, but to cite them can be racist. Authors write, properly so, according to canons of racial propriety and careful consideration, and then newspapers print scary racist commentary that follows without worry over its repercussions. Elites of all races navigate around race and class in matters of choosing homes, schools, and entertainment, and then lecture others on their illiberal Neanderthalism for trying to poorly emulate, according to their reduced stations, the patterns of picking a home, school, or golf course embraced by a Barack Obama or Eric Holder — or Rev. Wright.
For now we need to review the rules that racialists use and to navigate carefully around them. The stakes are quite high.
1) Noble Ends Sometimes Require Ignoble Means
The nation rightly condemned the repulsive racist chanting of some puerile University of Oklahoma fraternity members. President David Boren even summarily kicked them out of school, closed down the fraternity, and threw out its tenants — without a hearing, and in possible violation [1] of free speech statutes.
But if not to protect such creepy expression, then why have a First Amendment at all? Did the Founders wish to ensure us that someday we could all listen without censorship to an unfettered Julie Andrews freely singing “The Sound of Music”?
Eighty-year-old Donald Sterling, an ex-divorce lawyer and recipient of local NAACP citizenship awards as the Los Angeles Clippers owner, now said to be suffering from prostate cancer and Alzheimer’s, had his incoherent but private musingsstealthily taped [2] by a conniving gold-digging young mistress. And so the nation discovered that the tired, old and unhinged codger mouthed racist banalities. His repugnant speech lost him his basketball team and he was banned for life from attending professional basketball games.
Was the reasoning something like: “Why worry about curbing the First Amendment rights of a racist aged billionaire?”
Had he been caught in felonious behavior fixing a game or planning to dodge the IRS, would the punishment have been worse?
Eric Holder’s Department of Justice recently exonerated Officer Darren Wilson in the Ferguson shooting, after the cop had been tried, convicted, and ostracized in the court of elite opinion. Wilson, it found, in self-defense tragically and fatally shot Michael Brown — the latter fresh from committing a strong-armed robbery, walking in the middle of the street (apparently high on marijuana), attacking a police officer, etc. The 300-pound “youth” [3] charged Wilson and lunged at his weapon.
Did that truth matter? Or could it be sacrificed on the altar of racialism?
The ensuing lie cooked up by Brown’s rogue accomplice in the robbery — “hands up; don’t shoot” — is now canonized and has made its way as a cause celebre to the U.S. Congress. I think the logic is that, given slavery and Jim Crow of the past, it is rich of America now to insist on racially blind rules of evidence and speech.
Wilson is marked, finished as a policeman, and cannot safely go out in public. He would have perhaps been wiser to hand over his gun to Brown, and asked to take one bullet, in hopes that he could survive the wound and thereby save his job. Had Brown killed Wilson — as may well have been his intent — there would have not been protests anywhere by any group, racial or not — as there rarely are in Missouri when blacks are daily gunned downed by other blacks or whenBosnians are attacked by blacks [4].
Perhaps a liberal can explain the select expressions of outrage that make one death less important than another. Lives matter? Race matters? Context? Historical landscapes?
In matters of racial justice, the noble ends of supposed racial tolerance justify almost any means necessary to reach them.
In the case of George Zimmerman, he can be rebranded a “white Hispanic” to ensure that his multicultural fides do not rival his victim’s. His picture can be Photoshopped to downplay his wounds [5]. His 911 taped voice record can be edited[6] to make him sound callously racist — and all for a good cause of something other than racial harmony and integration.
In our sick society, such fantasies work both ways. Travyon Martin can be portrayed as a lovable preteen in his football uniform, without prior suspensions from school authorities. He eats Skittles [7], but doesn’t use burglar tools and drugs — or brag on social media of assaults on a bus driver. Martin, we are told by the president in the middle of the tense national debate over the case, might have looked like the son of Obama that he never had.
Editorializing in an ongoing criminal trial and investigation is now presidential habit. Affinity based not on shared values or common interests, but on superficial racial similarity, is proof of racial empathy. Had Trayvon Martin asked to take one of the daughters of Barack Obama to a Justin Bieber concert, would the president have weighed in and welcomed that invitation on the basis of Martin’s apparently shared appearance? Racial solidarity trumps all — or does it?
For the more noble purposes of ensuring racial harmony, Martin can easily be recalibrated as a preteen gunned down in cold blood by a racist vigilante, rather than — in the words of his friend Rachel Jeantel, who spoke on her cell phone to him in his last moments — attempting a preemptive “whoop ass” on a “creepy ass cracka” apparently deemed to be a nosy homosexual [8] on his way to “go get” Trayvon’s “little brother.” [9]
Using racist and homophobic language is now proof of someone else’s racism. Somehow we are supposed to accept that George Zimmerman is a racist and Rachel Jeantel just cannot be, given the history of racial relations in the country.
Had Zimmerman kept his pistol hidden and taken a good whoop-ass head-smashing [10], he would be just another asymmetrical statistic rather than public enemy number one of the therapeutic state. Could he not have taken one for the nation?
Again, the logic is that with an unrivaled history of racism, Americans have no right at this late stage in the relativist game to insist on racially blind absolutism. Apparently, the assumption is that while whites are collectively assumed to be racist, they are usually too clever to be spotted and exposed as racists by using racist language. Non-whites, in contrast, can use racist language either to show that they are not racist or to expose whites as racist by their reactions to racist language.
When we hear of something creepy like the Oklahoma racist singing or Michael Richards’ unhinged racist rant [11], we vie with each other to find superlatives of disparagement to prove our own superiority — or future deterrence — in the manner that no one quite knew how to stop clapping when Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin ended a four-hour monologue.
Not so when we hear that UC Berkeley black students recently demanded to rename a building [12] after convicted cop killer and fugitive Assata Shakur — as well as the creation of a racially segregated meeting place on campus that excludes anyone not black. Are we to laugh or cry?
2) Some Racialists Are Worse than Others
Non-white racialists, or rather at least some non-white racialists (Zimmerman, for example, was half-Latino), cannot be held to the same rules of racial forbearance. Given the centuries-old baggage of white racism, linguistic elasticity is necessary. The n-word is de rigueur in the multi-billion-dollar rap music industry. Black intellectuals assure us on television that it is a private term of endearment or solidarity among fellow blacks, but simultaneously proof of virulent racism when used by mostly ignorant white outliers. They may be right that race matters, but at least they should be intellectually honest enough to explain to America, especially to new immigrants or the young, why the horror of the n-word is predicated on who utters it.
If a black person used the n-word to disparage someone black, he is not necessarily a racist; Al Sharpton, who is the go-to dispenser of absolution when non-black racialists use the n-word, is on tape [13] calling former New York Mayor David Dinkins a n***er. If in emulative fashion a white wannabe uses the term [14] to denote friendship toward a black friend, he is a racist. I don’t question the logic or the contextualization necessary to pull such sleight of speech off, only the practicality of applying the unspoken but assumed rule in a nation where millions grew up in the age of affirmative action and racial intermarriage, not the Jim Crow South.
At some point an ignorant would-be rapper of any race is going to copycat his rapper heroes, and end up groupthinking himself out of existence — unless he is Justin Bieber [15]. Money and celebrity trump racialism?
Juxtapose the uncouth University of Oklahoma frat brothers with the latest rant from this month’s Playboy nude cover girl. Compare who has the greater outreach and clout — obscure undergraduates in Oklahoma, or the one on the cover of an iconic magazine. In Orval Faubus racist style, African-American rapper Azealia Banks quite proudly opines [16]:
I hate everything about this country. Like, I hate fat white Americans. All the people who are crunched into the middle of America, the real fat and meat of America, are these racist conservative white people who live on their farms. Those little teenage girls who work at Kmart and have a racist grandma — that’s really America.
Not much nuance in all that. No ambiguity. No need for code words. A corn farmer in Iowa who lives a monastic existence is the true villain of America.
Switch the adjective black for white in the above smear, and the speaker would now be persona non grata in the United States.
What was strange about her rant was the collective national snooze that met it: no presidential editorial, no NAACP admonition, no visit from Al Sharpton, no Black Caucus sermonizing. It was almost as if a sophisticated America, with Iran on the verge of becoming nuclear or the Middle East in ruins, could hardly waste its time commenting on a racist simpleton like Banks. Likewise, what proved eerie about the hatred in the Rev. Wright video sermon was not his venomous language, but the standing ovation and ecstatic glee of his congregation on hearing his hate.
Note that Banks, declaring herself a feminist, relies on using the n-word in her own rap music, ostensibly because if she did not, she would not have the sales, cred, and star-power clout to do pathetic nude layouts in sexist girlie magazines.
She has no worries that whites or blacks will march on her home Ferguson-style, or that record companies will do aPaula Deen [17] on her. She assumes rightly that her racism is contextualized and thus excused, and anyone else not of color saying something analogous should not be.
There is certainly little chance that the now-multimillionaire Banks will end up like racially sloppy-mouthed Don Imus[18], and be sent to serve time in the gulag of popular culture. After all, Banks uttered not one racist word, but an entire slew. To paraphrase Stalin, a single racist epithet is a tragedy; lots of them become mere statistics.
Words really don’t matter — only apparently the supposed color of the people who utter them. Nor is America to take seriously Jamie Foxx’s crude racist banter. (“I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?” or “Black people are the most talented people in the world”.)
Apparently without much debate, the country has accepted the principle of linguistic relativism: there is no such thing as racist language per se, given that non-whites cannot be held to the same standards of racial disparagement.
We live in a surreal age in which the two most powerful men in the United States — President Barack Obama and Attorney General Holder — can both periodically accuse others of racism and therefore themselves dip into it (“typical white person,” “cling to their…,” “punish our enemies, “nation of cowards,” “my people,” etc.).
The president warns of stereotyping on the basis of race all the time, and therefore was free to stereotype the working class of Pennsylvania, his own grandmother, the Cambridge police, and Darren Wilson. And when we descend to Al Sharpton, tragedy becomes farce. Is there one group that Sharpton has not slurred — homosexuals, Jews, whites? And how exactly did such a lurid history of racist disparagement and petty crime earn him exemption from the IRS [19] for chronic tax avoidance, or over 70 visits to the White House to counsel the administration on matters racial?
Is Sharpton’s theory homeopathic: to cure the scourge of racism, the medicine man must himself be racist?
To be continued…
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The Rules of Racialists—Part Two
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
Barack Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at Holder’s portrait unveiling ceremony, Department of Justice, Washington DC—Feb. 27, 2015 (Rex Features via AP Images)
Last week I reviewed some rules to navigate [1]in our race-obsessed culture. Here are three final statutes.
3) Class Is Irrelevant
In our racialist society, race always trumps class. In that sense, we do live in a classless society — at least as far as racial matters are concerned.
Eric Holder’s children, who improperly were flown to the Belmont Stakes with their dates in their father’s private government jet [2], would be entitled to affirmative action in a way that an impoverished grandchild of the Oklahoma diaspora is not. But at least a lower-middle-class white male is not penalized in college admissions to the degree that would be a straight-A Asian student. In today’s multiracial society of great economic fluidity, more than a half-century after the civil rights movement, the children of multimillionaire rappers would be deemed at a disadvantage in comparison to impoverished newly arrived destitute immigrants from Asia. But then again we are supposed to cry for the billionaire Oprah, who claims she was shown disrespect for gazing at some tony overpriced purse in a European millionaire boutique [3]. Such is the bathos of the current civil rights movement.
Diversity means not multiplicity of political views or even races, but de facto efforts to ensure that groups non-designated as sanctioned minorities are not represented in jobs or education beyond their percentages in the general populations. Blacks can number far more than 11% of the work force of the U.S. Postal Service or over 70% of the players in the lucrative NBA, but by no means can the student body of UC Berkeley exceed 50% Asian. To point this out superficially without contextualizing slavery and Jim Crow is itself deemed racist, not the act of accepting or rejecting applicants on the basis of their race. But we still know the unspoken margin-of-safety rule: Asians as a group supposedly enjoy impressive per-capita incomes and education levels, and thus many in the Asian community with mere 3.9 GPAs can take a racialist hit or two from the government, without damage to their self-esteem or career trajectories. Does a Susan Lee or Harold Chung really need to go to Harvard Law, when UC Davis will do? Or is the racism worse still? Asians are assumed to be just different: they “like” studying all night. That is what they do, so why the need to reward it?
4) One-drop Nation
In our intermarried, assimilated, and integrated society in which immigration is at an all-time high, race itself has become often a meaningless construct. Liberal prognosticators warn that the “white majority” will be no more. What does that mean in today’s racially mixed family — that one’s grandkids, brother-in-law, or spouse will suddenly put down their old white patriarch? That mom will have to show more respect to her daughter [4]? That dad will turn on his son?
We throw around imprecise terms like “white” and “black” as if they always refer to something real or ascertainable, only to be reminded occasionally by episodes of mistaken identity that they do not. Sometimes a black CNN talking head is dismissed as being typically white by a fellow black host [5], or the plot of a movie hinges on a professor who is in fact really black [6] being damned as a white racist. Rich Iberian Cubans are “Latinos”; but then so are indigenous people from Oaxaca. Elite Jamaicans in the U.S. for a year are African-Americans, in a way sixth-generation blacks from Alabama are also. Dark second-generation Tunisians are not African-Americans.
In our racial dystopia, “Asian” means you can be fifth-generation Japanese or Chinese or Hmong, Thai, or Filipino, as if the government is trying to reforge some bankrupt imperial Japanese notion of a Co-Prosperity Sphere solidarity. But then again “white” means that you can be dark and are named Wilson with a Mexican mother named Hernandez — in a way that “Latino” means you can be white and are named Hernandez with a mother named Wilson.
Somewhere in the Harvard admissions office or the Ethnic Studies Department at CSU or UC, there must apparently be clerks busy at work in the basement consulting arcane racial lineage scrolls of unspoken pedigrees. To paraphrase Demades, racial polarization is now the “cement of democracy.”
My rural Punjabi neighbors are literally black; Valerie Jarrett, Jeh Johnson and Jeremiah Wright are not by any stretch of the imagination. The former do not earn affirmative action, the children of the latter would. The logic is that the Punjabis escaped the legacy of racism of Jim Crow — in the way that Barack Obama did as well? Or is the racial math that today’s racists are clever devils and can spot that dark Punjabis are distinguishable from lighter African-Americans? If you find such discussions sickening, remember that it is the silent basis for much of our current law, custom, and practice. In our ill society, there are hundreds of racist protocols that guide not just private, but government behavior, all of which if voiced publicly and honestly would boomerang on the whistle blower and earn him charges of racism. Official racist assumptions are never spelled out, only assumed — and immune from audit.
5) Good and Bad Racists
When politics is thrown into the mix, race becomes even more absurd. Or rather when the matter hinges on full-fledged support for the lavish redistributive state, exemption is extended to racists. Clarence Thomas, a real product of the Jim Crow South and unmistakably black, is periodically slurred by elite blacks [7] as a sellout for his skepticism of big-government redistribution. Authentically black would include Barry Dunham Obama and Eric Holder, whose ancestries are mixed and not of the Old South. Joe Biden can insult Punjabis. Both Harry Reid and Joe Biden can talk sloppily and in racist fashion of “clean” and “articulate” blacks [8] and “Negro dialects.” [9] But we know that in their liberal hearts such disturbing language can only be harmless. Had Mitt Romney mouthed such racialism, his candidacy would have ended then and there — as would that of any black conservative who said something as insensitive about whites.
In our Lala land of diversity, Asians cannot be racially intolerant of blacks, nor blacks of Latinos nor Latinos of Asians. We have created this make-believe rubric “white” and threw into it Jews, Irish, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Spaniards, and Portuguese, who all outnumber the old “Anglo-Saxons.” Who qualifies and who doesn’t, no one quite knows. We take it for granted that that no one knows, but that everyone is curious to find out why in the mind of the government clerk or campus diversity czar the white Castilian aristocrat on the evening news with the trilled last name and the one-quarter black woman from St. Thomas are somehow non-whites in the way a dark Armenian-American or Pakistani is white. Is the white barometer predicated on assimilation, culture, behavior, financial success, intermarriage, accent, education, or just self-invention that all trump superficial appearance?
Lies fall by their own weight.
Millions of Americans have become baffled by myths such as “hands up, don’t shoot” [10] and “white Hispanic” [11] — if they have not already tuned out the racial neuroses of the elite long ago. Calling someone “racist” and demands of ostracism from society for sloppy speech have almost become proof that the accuser himself is a racialist, a believer in race as the father of us. If Martin Luther King’s dream of race as incidental not essential to our characters were ever reified, millions of racialist Americans would be out of a job.
